


Nineteen

by Thistlerose



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Gen, Missing Scene, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-07
Updated: 2012-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-30 18:55:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/334976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thistlerose/pseuds/Thistlerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was nineteen years old. She didn't want to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nineteen

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story I've been trying to write for years, since I watched "Revenge of the Sith," actually. I've been trying to reconcile the ending of that film with what Leia tells Luke in "Return of the Jedi."

All her life, Leia Organa had known that Queen Breha was not her real mother. Even as a small baby, she had been aware of another source of love and comfort, tucked away in a remote corner of her heart. Invisible and out of reach perhaps, but as real as the sweet-smelling arms that rocked her to sleep each night. 

Leia never asked about her real mother.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to know, or that she thought her questions would upset the people who’d raised her, whom she did think of as her parents.

She never knew why she didn’t ask. Questions lingered at the back of her mind - _Who was she? How did she die? Why does she always seem so sad?_ \- but like stones in a riverbed, they never worked their way to the surface. 

Also, by the time Leia was old enough to put her feelings into words, she was aware of things happening far beyond the sparkling white walls of her home on Alderaan, things that seemed much more important, even to her young mind. There was the Imperial Senate, where she worked alongside her father. And then there was the Rebel Alliance, which quickly became her preoccupation. And while the feeling that someone was watching over her shoulder never went away, she assumed there would be time to ask after the Empire was overthrown.

When Alderaan exploded, Leia mourned Queen Breha and Bail Organa as if they were her real parents. Lying in her cell on the Death Star, awaiting execution, she felt the fragments of her world ricochet inside her chest, lacerating her heart. 

It hurt to move. It hurt just to breathe. In the silence of her cell, the terrified cries of everyone she had ever known seemed to beat inside her brain.

She thought she was going to die. If not of grief, then at Grand Moff Tarkin’s hands. Or Darth Vader’s. It didn’t matter whose. All that mattered, she supposed, was that Captain Antilles’s R2 unit had made it safely to Tatooine and Obi-Wan Kenobi. If she was lucky, she would be dead long before Mon Mothma and the others found the Death Star’s weak spot - assuming it had one.

If she wasn’t lucky...

Leia closed her eyes and told herself that she was not afraid of torture. She’d withstood it before; she could withstand it again. She could be brave in the face of pain and death.

She didn’t want to die. 

She was only nineteen, and there was so much she still hadn’t done, hadn’t seen.

Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to have much choice. She had no weapons, or anything in her cell that she could turn into a weapon; the walls were sleek, her cot a mere protrusion that did not seem detachable in any way. All she could hope to do, she thought, was face her killers barehanded and open-eyed, as the people of Alderaan had not been allowed to do. Make a good end.

She exhaled, and for a moment it seemed as if there was nothing left to breathe back in. The walls fell away, and she stood on the brink of something vast and dark. She could feel her heart pounding, her eyelids sinking as if each of her lashes were weighted. It was in that moment that she heard the voice of her mother, her _real_ mother, calling to her from the darkness at her feet, clear and strong for the first time in her life.

_Leia. Don’t lose your will to live._

Each word struck at her, causing her to recoil.

Don’t lose your will to live.

At her sides, Leia’s fists clenched.

Her eyes opened.

She could breathe again.

She was still alive. She might die in the next hour, or in the next minute but that reality seemed very far away. Right _now_ , she was alive, and she intended to stay alive for as long as she could, and to keep hoping.

A calmness slipped over her. She felt cool and a little bit lightheaded, as if she were floating just outside her body. 

She didn’t come back to herself until the door to her cell slid open. Her mother’s words echoed inside her as she said with perfect serenity to the man who had entered, “Aren’t you a little short for a storm trooper?”

2/7/2012


End file.
